Chapter Ten
Rider Hall,
April 27, 1812
The candlelight wavered as Sophie headed back to the room she used as her office. She jumped when her foot hit the seventh stair from the bottom and the riser creaked beneath her slipper-shod foot. That stair always creaked, but she’d let her thoughts get away from her, and she hadn’t been prepared for the noise, even though she knew it was coming. A shiver of fear lingered between her shoulder blades. If ever there was a time for a ghost to appear, now was it. Despite the hour, half past two in the morning, and despite the silence in the house, there were no ghosts walking the halls of Rider Hall.
She turned the corner, her mind already back to her story. Poor Beatrice. Her young life was not going as well as it ought. And thank goodness. Her story had been stalled these past days and only just now had she worked her way past the troublesome issue of what was going to happen to the girl. She continued down the stairs and along the hallway to the room where she wrote when Tommy was at home.
So intent was she on Beatrice and her unhappy fate now that her aged aunt was dead and her fiancé was missing in Arabia that Sophie didn’t notice someone else was in the room until she was halfway in. When she first saw the looming shape, her heart slammed against her chest. The sensation was a good deal less pleasant than her fright on the stairs. An instant later, which might as well have been a lifetime later, she realized the intruder was none other than Tommy’s infernal companion, Lord Banallt.
His head was angled toward the lamp she’d left burning while she was upstairs attending to personal matters. He held several sheets of paper. Not just random sheets of paper, but her manuscript. And he was reading. Her manuscript! She didn’t know whether to be furious or embarrassed. Both, it happened. The work was not even half done and contained much to be corrected and improved. He had no business reading without asking. She would have told him no if he had.
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” she said curtly.
He turned his head toward her without moving any other part of his body. His hair gleamed black as ink, and the lamplight gave his eyes an unsettling silver glow. Gracious, was it possible for a man to be more handsome than he? Tommy was angelic, but Banallt was so darkly intense that when she looked at him she couldn’t imagine thinking any other man deserved to be called handsome. “Ah,” he said. “Mrs. Evans.”
“Those are my personal papers, sir.” She struggled to keep outrage from her voice. It wasn’t easy. How dare he invade her privacy? Those were her papers. Her book. Her writing. How dare he? And her very next thought was she would be completely undone if he told Tommy she was writing. Tommy wouldn’t understand. Never. And if her husband found out she was selling what she wrote? Her stomach clenched into a painful knot.
Two hours ago, Tommy and Banallt had come home from whatever carousing they’d been doing in town, with Tommy singing at the top of his lungs. They’d roused the household, had more to drink, and then Tommy had come into their room and stretched out on the bed even before his valet had arrived. Sophie left him. Let his servant get him undressed and sorted out. With her husband in another drunken sleep, she’d thought she was safe from interruption. Tommy wasn’t going to wake up and doubtless Lord Banallt, too, was snoring between the sheets. So she’d thought.
“I saw the light on and thought it was your husband.”
“It wasn’t,” she said. Banallt wasn’t reading anymore, but he hadn’t put the pages down, either.
He tipped his head to one side. If he was drunk, he didn’t show it. He sounded and appeared perfectly sober. He couldn’t be, though. Tommy had come home drunk, and surely so was Banallt, and her experience of Banallt in such a state was not agreeable. She did not want to snatch the pages from him, but she might have to. “You are up very late, ma’am. Do you not sleep at night?” he asked. All perfectly pleasant.
“Rarely.” She scowled at her manuscript held in his long-fingered hands. “Those are my papers. Please put them back where you found them.”
“I am used to London hours.” He leaned a hip against the edge of her desk. In the light, his complexion was ghostly pale, and his eyes gleamed like a cat’s. “In Town if I fall into my bed much before dawn, I’ve made an early night of it.” He smiled, and Sophie felt a tug in her chest. For all his faults, and Banallt had a great many, he hadn’t Tommy’s vindictiveness. “But I daresay the same cannot be said of you.”
She pressed her lips together and walked toward the desk, where she set down her candle. She did not smell liquor. Without looking at him, she picked up the pages of her story. He must think her a foolish woman, writing away in the dark of night, when no respectable lady read such novels, let alone penned them. “It is not your right, sir, to invade my privacy.” She glanced at him and found his eyes steady on her. From the looks of things, he’d picked up her pages toward the middle. The most troublesome spot, too. She refused to look away from his pewter gaze. “Scribbles,” she said. “Only scribbles.”
“An interesting choice of word,” he said mildly.
“My scribbles can be of no interest to a man like you.”
“Pray tell me what you mean, Mrs. Evans.”
“You’ll find no verses, no lofty emotions. No Greek or Roman oratory. I write to amuse myself with lives I can never live. And if others are diverted as well, then let it be so.” Those pages in his hand exposed her, opened her wide to a man she wished weren’t here at all. There were two piles of paper on the desk. One consisted of the undisturbed beginning pages, the second of the overturned pages he’d read from the inch-thick set in his hands. He’d been careful, she saw, not to get her pages out of order. “It’s how I pass the time, my lord.”
“Mere amusements, if I may boldly contradict you, rarely keep ladies of good breeding up past midnight.” Another smile quirked at the corner of his mouth. “At least not in the country.”
“I don’t sleep well.” The words came out with genuine emotion instead of sounding distant and chilly, as she’d meant. “I never have since I came here.” She didn’t sleep well; that was true. He held her pages against his chest, drat the man. She could not simply take them back. “I have nightmares, if you must know.”
His eyebrows rose. “Nightmares?”
“You know. The usual. Ogres in the closet She shrugged. Unpaid bills. Looming expenses—Tommy’s bootmaker was especially fond of sending a representative to Rider Hall. A husband she did not see for months at a time. “Strange noises in the house. The wind. My father often complained of my overactive imagination.”
“Ah,” he said. He didn’t sound convinced, but then, wasn’t that the beauty of polite excuses? They weren’t meant to be examined, only accepted as plausible.
“My lord, please.” She bit her lower lip. His gaze dropped to her mouth. He wasn’t drunk enough, if he was drunk at all, for her to hope she could divert him. “If you have been reading—”
“I confess I have.”
“—then it’s perfectly obvious what that is.” She sighed as she stared out the window behind the earl. Moonlight silvered the lawn and the hedges beyond. “I work best when it’s quiet.” She sighed. There was no hope for it. He knew. “At night, with you and Tommy about, I cannot work in my room. So I am in here.” She pinned him with her most earnest gaze. With luck, he would suffer an attack of regrets and leave Rider Hall. “Here,” she said in meaningful tones, “I may have my privacy and my thoughts to myself.”
“Scribbling away,” he said. He did not sound in the least drunk. “In the dark of night.”
“Yes.”
“As scribbles go,” he said, “yours are better than most.” The corner of his mouth, with its full lower lip, curved as he looked at the pages against his chest. She despised him for his beauty. “This is very good.” Another smile slid across his face. “Have you thought of publishing?”
There was no point in pretending she didn’t know what he meant or that she’d never thought of such a thing and was flattered by the suggestion. She hadn’t the patience anyway. She lifted her chin and met his peculiar tarnish eyes. She touched a finger to the desktop. Men were invariably taller than she was. Sophie was used to looking up. But Banallt was taller than most, and besides, she particularly disliked looking up at him. But she did and found herself struck anew by his dark good looks. If she were an artist, she’d paint him as Lucifer. She held his gaze and ignored the fact that he stared back. However compelling she found him, the fact remained that Lord Banallt was Tommy’s friend, and Banallt’s reputation was far from pleasant, as she had personal reason to know. She saw no point in pretending about that, either. With another sigh, she said, “Do you think the bills are paid from my husband’s generosity and deep pockets?”
Some emotion, she could not tell what it might be, lit his eyes. “No, Mrs. Evans. I expect they are not.”
She spoke over him because it occurred to her that he was mocking her. How dare he belittle her? “Because they are not, my lord. I assure you of that. I write because the bills must be paid somehow, and because even if I had a talent for farming, which I have not, it wouldn’t matter. Tommy owns Rider Hall but not the land. He sold that shortly after we married.”
“I know.”
“Unless Tommy sends me something—from his gaming winnings, no doubt—there is no income here but what I bring in from those scribbles you cavalierly mock.”
His eyebrows rose. “Mock? No, Mrs. Evans. I do not mock you.” His serious reply caught her off guard. “I’m going to ask you an unforgivably rude question.”
“Are you sure you ought?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three?”
“Yes.”
“It was rude of me to read this without asking your permission,” he said.
She eyed the pages in his hand, but not even that got him to put them down. “I should like them back, please.”
“You were just a girl when you married Tommy.” His eyebrows drew together. “You couldn’t possibly have known anything about life.”
She pressed her lips together. There he was again, mocking her. “I was in love, my lord. Head over heels in love. That was more than enough life for me.”
“Mrs. Evans…”
She bowled over his silence. “Have no fear. I have learned quickly since I was married.”
That too-attentive look flashed back into his eyes. He walked over to a settee with her manuscript still in his hands. “Do sit down, Mrs. Evans. It’s late, and as we are both yet awake and neither one of us has yawned, let us speak a while longer. May I?” he asked, meaning, might he sit. When she waved a hand, he sat, legs sprawled so that she could not help but notice the muscled curve of his thighs. “You were in love,” he said. “But no longer?”
“He is my husband, my lord.”
He let his head fall back on the settee, staring at God knows what on the ceiling. When he looked back at her, his expression was unreadable. “A hypothetical, if I may.”
“If I answer, will you give back my novel? I’ve bills to pay.”
“I wonder whether you will answer to my satisfaction.”
She sat sideways on the desk chair and gave him a challenging stare.
“Come closer. You’re too far away.” He grinned. “Just here.” He pointed to an upholstered chair near him.
“Will you give back my book if I do?”
“You’re a persistent woman.” He leaned back and made a sit there motion with one hand. “No. Not yet.”
She stayed where she was and crossed her ankles. She tucked her feet as far under her chair as they reached. “What is your hypothetical?”
“If you were married to me, Mrs. Evans, knowing what I am, would you be faithful?”
She made a face. “But I’m not married to you.”
“Hence I pose it to you as a hypothetical, Mrs. Evans. I’m curious to know the answer.” Another of his fleeting smiles flashed over his face. That smile intrigued her. He seemed another man entirely then. “Indulge me with your piquant honesty.”
“Of course I would be faithful.”
“Why of course?” He shrugged. “I would not be faithful to you.”
“Marriage is a vow before God and before oneself, my lord. He cocked his head, obviously waiting to hear more. “I would not marry a man I did not love. And therefore, if I were married to you, it would be because I was in love. And to a woman in love, faithfulness is the air she breathes, not a meal she chooses. One day this, another that. Changing menus all the time because one grows bored.”
“Do you still love your husband?” he softly asked.
She interlaced her fingers and forced her hands to relax on her lap. “I made a vow,” she said. “And that is more than enough.”
“I love my wife. But I am not faithful to her.”
She lifted her gaze. He sounded oddly plaintive. Rakes did not pine for fidelity, did they? “That is nothing to do with me.”
“I think it is not in my nature to be faithful. I love her. No one takes her place in my heart, but—” He frowned, and Sophie was astonished to see that he was thinking quite hard. “Why is that not enough for you?”
“How is it that you, the rogue extraordinaire, understand so little of women?”
He leaned forward. “I have a daughter, did you know that?”
“No.”
“She’s nearly three. There is no one in this world I love more. I would give my life for her.” He settled back, his hands still on her pages. “When I became a father, I never expected that. Never. But I would. It’s frightening to find oneself so vulnerable.”
“I can see that,” she said. Manifestly, that was true.
“There are days when I wonder who she will grow up to marry. Will she marry for love or make a political union to please her father? For which ought I to hope? Will she love her husband and be miserable or will she be happy enough in a marriage that had not, after all, engaged her heart?”
“What an odd choice you present. Love and misery or no love and happiness. Why can’t a woman be in love and happy?”
He draped an arm along the top of the settee, but his eyes were intense on her face. “Are you?”
“If your daughter has even half your intelligence, and if you do not raise her to be ignorant…Do not tell me you are one of those men who think women ought to be ignorant.”
“Perish the thought, madam.”
“Then she will be happy in love.” Sophie couldn’t help but smile. How unexpected this was, to learn that Lord Banallt was a devoted parent. “Be a wonderful father to her, and she’ll meet someone wonderful, my lord.”
“I won’t allow anything less.” His eyes danced and for once did not strike her as eerie. “And yet I think, my God, if her husband does not make her happy, I’ll kill him.” He threw a hand into the air, describing a quick and deadly arc. “Or thrash him within an inch of his life. No man will make my little girl cry over her broken heart.”
Sophie thought much better of Lord Banallt.
“Women, in my experience,” he said, “are rarely happy to think their husbands stray.” He turned over her pages and scanned them. “Men, Mrs. Evans, are deceitful creatures who demand fidelity of their wives while they discreetly set up a mistress or take one lover after another.”
“Not all husbands do, you know,” she said. “Some are faithful.”
“But not I.”
Neither of them, she thought, saw fit to include Tommy in that company of faithful husbands. She knew the truth, but did not know it, and she preferred it that way. “Perhaps you ought to set your daughter a better example, my lord.”
“No doubt you’re right.” He stretched out a leg. They fell silent while he considered her. “You’re a fine writer, Mrs. Evans.”
The compliment caught her off guard. This time she really was flattered. “Thank you.”
“Who will Beatrice end up with, I wonder? I burn with curiosity to know. Will it be the fiancé or the young nobleman who refuses to show her his face?”
“Perhaps Ralf, her cousin and guardian.”
Banallt waved a hand. “Never. He’s the villain. No heroine ever marries the villain at the end.”
“Perhaps I’m writing a tragedy.”
His eyes pinned her. “What name do you publish under? Not your own. I should have recognized it otherwise.”
She hesitated before she answered, and he gave her a sideways look with a mischievous smile. “Very well.” She frowned. “I write as Mrs. Merchant.”
Lord Banallt sat up. He was still holding her pages, drat the man. “Not The Murder of Gilling Fell?”
“You’ve read it?” Her heart leaped.
He brought in his legs and leaned toward her. “Can this be so? The authoress of The Desert Corsair and The Orphan of Hopewell Moor sits before me?”
“I’m astonished,” she said. Despite herself, she was immensely flattered. “You’ve read my books?”
“You, madam,” he said, laughing, “have been responsible for keeping me up nearly twenty hours straight. I’ve read all your books, but for The Peruvian Escape. I’ve not found that as yet.”
“That was my first.”
“Yes, Mrs. Evans, you are quite my favorite authoress.”
“My lord.” She squeezed her fingers because she’d only now, far too late, realized what a dreadful mistake she’d made, putting her secret in the hands of a man like Banallt. Her throat closed off, and she had to take a deep breath before more words would come. She stared at her hands. What had she done, admitting anything to him, confessing even the name under which she published? He would think he knew her, and he didn’t. He didn’t know her at all.
“I’m not a fool, Mrs. Evans.” He tsk-tsked at her. “What horror are you imagining?”
“Please.” She looked up. He was still leaning forward, one hand on his knee, the other holding her manuscript pages. “Do not tell my husband.”
His face went dark, and Sophie’s heart raced. She’d heard the rumors about him. The absent master of Castle Darmead was no gentleman. Even here, so far from London, one heard tales. She couldn’t bear to look at him, so she stared again at her lap. She wouldn’t. No matter what he said or did or threatened. She wouldn’t. She lifted her eyes from her lap and found him watching her. The sensation was not pleasant.
His eyes grew darker. “You would find yourself quite humiliated, not to mention badgered for money, if Tommy knew of your talent. You would indeed have a difficult time of it. If he knew.”
“Then you do understand.”
“Given his debts, I don’t imagine he’d be able to keep the house if you weren’t paying the taxes. I assume that’s what you’ve done with the money.”
“It’s not as though the writing is very profitable. But an extra ten or fifteen pounds a quarter—”
“No wonder you write so quickly.”
“Not the muse,” she said softly, “so much as necessity.” She was talking to a man who had, in all likelihood, spent that much and more in town, drinking with her husband, just tonight. A man like him would have no idea what ten pounds meant when you had to sit with the bills to decide which ones to pay this time. “Are you going to tell him?”
He shot to his feet. Her pages rattled in the air. “Do you think me so base as that?”
She stood up, too. “You’ve blackmailed women before.”
“Have I?”
“Everyone says so.”
“Well then. It’s so.” He dropped her manuscript on the settee and walked to her. Sophie would have retreated if her knees hadn’t hit the chair behind her. He put his hands on either of her cheeks, holding her face. His skin burned hers; his eyes held her gaze and stared into her soul. “What would you be willing to do in return for my silence?”
She didn’t answer.
“Well,” he said, drawing out the word in an unbearably sensuous whisper. “And so. What an interesting moment this is.”
What would it be like to be in the arms of a man who wanted her? Who actually seemed to admire her? She was attracted to him. What woman wouldn’t be? But that didn’t mean she would act on the sensations racing through her. She pulled back.
He let go of her. “Your secret is safe with me, Mrs. Evans.”
She stepped back and hit the chair. He caught her upper arm, steadying her. He leaned closer. “Lovely, sad little Sophie Mercer Evans,” he said in the voice of Satan himself. “When I take you to bed, I assure you, it won’t be because I’ve coerced you. It will be because you want to be there.”